I'm an expert in business growth and overcoming organizational obstacles to success and a public speaker at conferences and management meetings on how to grow your organization. I'm a workshop leader for companies wanting to find their next growth engine, an author of "Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition" (Financial Times Press), a contributing editor for "International Journal of Innovation Science" and a leadership columnist for CIOMagazine and ComputerWorld. I am a former head of business development for Pepsico and Dupont, consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and am currently Managing Partner for Spark Partners. Harvard MBA. Hail from Chicago.

Why Steve Jobs Couldn't Find a Job Today

Business people keep piling onto the innovation and growth bandwagon. PWC just released the results of its 14th annual CEO survey entitled “Growth Reimagined.” Seems like most CEOs are as tired of cost cutting as everyone else, and would really like to start growing again. Therefore, they are looking for innovations to help them improve competitiveness and build new markets. Hooray!

But, haven’t we heard this before? Seems like the output of several such studies – from IBM, IDC and many others – have been saying that business leaders want more innovation and growth for the last several years! Hasn’t this been a consistent mantra all through the last decade? You could get the impression everyone is talking about innovation, and growth, but few seem to be doing much about it!

Rather than search out growth, most businesses are still trying to simply do what their business has done for decades – and marveling at the lack of improved results. David Brooks of the New York Times talks at length in his recent Op Ed piece, the Experience Economy, about a controversial book from Tyler Cowen called “The Great Stagnation.” The argument goes that America was blessed with lots of fertile land and abundant water, giving the country a big advantage in the agrarian economy from the 1600s into the 1900s. During the Industrial economy of the 1900s America was again blessed with enormous natural resources (iron ore, minerals, gold, silver, oil, gas and water) as well as navigable rivers, the great lakes and natural low-cost transport routes. A rapidly growing and hard working set of laborers, aided by immigration, provided more fuel for America’s growth as an industrial powerhouse.

natural resources aren’t the big advantage they once were. Foodstuffs require almost no people for production. And manufacturing is shifting to offshore locations where cheap labor and limited regulations allow for cheaper production. And it’s not clear America would benefit even if it tried maintaining these lower-skilled jobs. Today, value goes to those who know how to create, store, manipulate and use information. And success in this economy has a lot more to do with innovation, and the creation of entirely new products, industries and very different kinds of jobs.

Unfortunately, however, we keep hiring for the last economy. While we “get” the need for innovation, we don’t seem to understand much about how to “do it.” The problem starts with how Boards of Directors (and management teams) select – incorrectly, it appears – our business leaders. Still thinking like out-of-date industrialists, Scientific American offers us a podcast on how “Creativity Can Lesson a Leader’s Image.” Citing the same study, Knowledge @ Wharton offers us “A Bias Against ‘Quirky’ Why Creative People Can Lose Out on Leadership Positions.” While 1,500 CEOs say that creativity is the single most important quality for success today – and studies bear out the greater success of creative, innovative leaders – the study found that when it came to hiring and promoting practices businesses consistently marked down the creative managers and bypassed them, selecting less creative types!

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As we approach the singularity, it will no longer be those with the biggest armies that control the world. It will be those with the brightest minds, the most access to new technologies. It’s been this way since at least the 50′s, When science far outstripped brute force. A country that can’t produce more scientists, more creative thinkers, more artists, will eventually be overtaken by those that can.

But will these brightest minds be in positions of leadership – or cloaked under layers of bureacratic mediocrity? What does it take to allow the innovative permission and resources to actually create breakthrough performance?

Your article is, IMO, excellent and well put: we need creative leaders to allow innovation to occur in existing companies. There is a danger, though, in assuming that only leaders matter, and that innovation & risk-taking isn’t a matter of company culture.

You ask if the “brightest minds (will) be in positions of leadership – or cloaked under layers of bureaucratic mediocrity?” I would ask: is it possible for a company to mentor and cultivate competent creative leaders within a mediocre bureaucracy?

Yes, it’s possible, but not likely.

That’s why the question “If Steve Jobs (or his clone) showed up at our company asking for a job – would we give him one?” is so provocative. It’s not just a question of whether your Board of Directors would appoint him CEO or opt for someone more conservative, it’s also a question of whether a young Jobs or Gates could even get past your HR department. …and if they did, would they thrive, fail or get fired?

Well put opendna. It does take the right kind of organization to foster and implement innovation – not just the right leader. An organization that accepts diversity in its workforce, gives them permission to operate outside tight norms and resources to accomplish things. Too often organizations fail at more than one of these important qualities!

Thanks for commenting hery3dogg. Your comments are quite prevalent in how people think about leaders and innovation.

Innovative leaders are often hired, and trained. Jack Welch at GE took the company into many new markets, and exploded profitable revenues. What’s important is leaders know how to overcome lock-in to old success formulas in order to attempt new things.

Secondly, your economics on the Newton could use some reworking. The Newton was soon followed by Palm, which was a phenomenally profitable success. The market pioneered by the Newton (PDA – or Personal Digital Assistant) was the forerunner of the smartphone – a market still growing.

Apple’s mistake was not allowing ongoing experimentation and adaptation to bring the PDA market to fruition. While the Newton had some serious shortcomings (no keyboard entry, for example) had the product been given permission to thrive and adapt, as well as resources, Apple may never have taken the 15 year stumble that almost ended the company.

Actually in hindsight the Newton could have been Steve Jobs mis-step. Were the product not so closely associated with John Sculley, and his antipathy for Sculley running so deep, Apple might have been able to stay the course and make a decent … iPhone? The lack of a keyboard on the iPhone hasn’t limited it’s success much, and yes, there WERE keyboards available for the Newton in any event. I have to confess I own a Newton or two, and when provoked I can pull one out to demonstrate. Even the cursive handwriting recognition isn’t as bad as people make out. For a party trick – try and have people tell you how old it is! In the environment of the times, with Apple being scoffed at as a takeover target and the product line generally non-existent, developing the Newton probably wasn’t an option, but it’s a pretty straight line from the Newton to today’s ‘smart’ phones.

The REAL issue is that Steve Jobs was fired at all. NOn-executive directors with their eye on their own balls couldn’t find a way to work with the guy, and that’s the real problem. Innovation is a GAMBLE, and only startups with nothing to lose, and truly secure leaders, ever feel secure enough in their mandate to take a chance — like the iPod, or the iPhone. Look at what’s happened to RIM and Nokia, or the US car industry. Incremental innovation almost never keeps up with the market, and it takes a revolution, ala Apple of the mid-90s, or RIM today, to make innovation a priority again.

That’s because so much is manufactured in China! His ‘I-Pod’ is made there but I might as well (and I did) find another major brand 4gbs mp3 player at a lesser cost ($31 x 2 = $62, bought 2 so I have the same as the ‘I-Pod’ ($149) (mp3-music and mp4-video$) and saved $87 bucks! The less I send overseas (I know some profits come here) hopefully more will be manufactured here!!!

Great article. Most large corporations seem to literally go out of their way to stifle innovation. The nature of incentives promote stagnation or the wrong kind of risks in a lot of cases and that is just the beginning. Disincentives to such innovative risk have huge consequences. Who needs the grief?

In the 1980s Chevron had a program called “Stretch Goals” that was the innovative equivalent of Google’s much vaunted “20 Percent Time” program. I doubt you would find Chevron with that program today. Why?

Someone at Gartner came up with the term Versatilist years ago and predicted that such cross disciplined people would be a sought after resource in the coming years. Not yet. Too bad because that kind of person can really provide new perspective to spawn innovation.

I have to say, after reading a lot about innovation the last few years it seems to be that innovation really works far better with more than one person. Most famous innovations were more imitation or collaboration than solitary innovation. Hiring the people would help, but just getting corporate teams to work a little differently together would go a long way too.